Quotes About Measurement

For centuries, economic thinkers, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes, have tried to identify the elusive formula that makes some countries more prosperous and successful than others. My curiosity about this topic spurred me, as a young professor of economics in the late 1970s, to research new ways of measuring national competitiveness.

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.

There's a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can't measure. We can't find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it's there.

If we cannot accurately measure poverty, we surely cannot accurately measure our efforts to tackle it.

To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer.

I make myself pizza if it comes down to that drastic measurement.

I would only have been too pleased if someone had asked me for my data. If you really believed in your data, you wouldn't mind someone looking at it. You should be able to respond that if you don't believe me go out and do the measurements yourself.

I'm probably an average hitter, at least, and if you talk to my peers, they will tell you that I hit the ball plenty far enough.

I measured my success by how many clients I had and how many billable hours I had.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.

My sister Susan, who was the first one, was pretty good in mathematics and then chess, and my father chose chess because it was easier to measure the results.

I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a 'soul' and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap.

I could have never been a high diver or a gymnast because I don't like subjectivity. I love where I'm faster than you,, or I can jump higher or swim faster. I don't want you holding a card before I figure out whether I won or lost.

We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.

If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It's one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we'll never know what it is.

What's the burn scale?

I don't believe in statistics. There are too many factors that can't be measured. You can't measure a ballplayer's heart.

Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.

Ninety feet between bases is perhaps as close as man has ever come to perfection.

Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts, Robert Browning.

To reckon his age he carved numbers in his foot, and his sole ached like a goblet which has never held wine.

Nations customarily measure the "costs of war" in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms